To resist change, to try to cling to life, is therefore like holding your breath: if you persist you kill yourself.
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, open-ness – an act of trust in the unknown. An.
When someone says, “Time to stop now!” he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We.
No one wants to be loved out of a sense of duty.
The energy and material which we have all squandered on making war since even 1914 could have warmed, fed, and clothed everyone on Earth, but we go about this atrocious squandering in the name of such immaterial and irrelevant fantasies as religion, honor, ideology, progress, racial purity, and patriotism – the last being not love of one’s country but of the idea of one’s country.
Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead.
For when we fail to see that our life is change, we set ourselves against ourselves and become like Ouroboros, the misguided snake, who tries to eat his own tail. Ouroboros is the perennial symbol of all vicious circles, of every attempt to split our being asunder and make one part conquer the other.
We are really stuck with ourselves, and our attempts to reject or to accept are equally fruitless, for they fail to reach that inaccessible center of our selfhood which is trying to do the accepting or the rejecting.
You do not need to control the rain if you can control your mind. If you get wet it is only your mind that makes you think it’s uncomfortable to be wet.
Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect. Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
A Christianity which is not basically mystical must become either a political ideology or a mindless fundamentalism.
Zen emphasizes immediate action. When anything is to be done, it should be done immediately without thinking it over in advance.
If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God. The.
We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness.
Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.
When you get the message, it’s time to hang up the phone.
What we know by memory, we know only at secondhand.
Tools such as these, as well as the tools of language and thought, are of real use to men only if they are awake – not lost in the dreamland of past and future, but in the closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this moment.
At such times we are so aware of the moment that no attempt is made to compare its experience with other experiences.
There is no greater freedom than the freedom to be what you are now.